It’s everywhere and nowhere baby!

Andrew Dillon, for the ASIST Bulletin, October /November 2002*

I’ve spent part of the summer wondering about what is next for IA. On
the back of planning next year’s ASIST Summit on IA (to be held
in Portland OR on March 21-23, see http://www.asis.org
for pointers) and the successful publication of the JASIST special
issue, 2002 seems to have been a good year for IA. O’Reilly has
now published Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld’s 2nd edition of
the “polar bear”, the IA community’s nickname for the
book that can claim to have started it all (at least this time around).
If I am not mistaken we are even beginning to see more new positions for
IA’s announced on SIGIA-L. Certainly the signs are positive.

However, away from the community and intellectual aspects of IA, the realities
of information space for real users is not so rosy. I use an exercise in my
classes that encourages students to critically examine their interactions with
the world of information technology. Rather than just blindly blame their errors
on either themselves (a strangely widespread human affliction in this context)
or on the ignorant designers who produced the application, I teach people to
think through the issues as a stream of psychological and physical processes
that mediate between initiation and completion of an interaction. A consequence
of this exercise, I have noted, is that once you start doing this, it can prove
difficult to stop analyzing the range of interactions you experience daily.

This is certainly true for me and I find myself continually trying to understand
just how some spaces (physical and informational) are considered acceptable
by users. Wondering through Chicago’s O’Hare Airport recently looking
for an ATM I was bemused and subsequently annoyed by the lack of meaningful
signage in the gate area. Here is one of the busiest airports in the world and
the lack of meaningful information in that space betrays a cavalier attitude
to user experience (and I never did locate an ATM).

Wrestling with OSX to connect wirelessly for the first time on my laptop in
a public space had me cursing Apple’s (usually excellent) designers for
violating the expectations of the faithful who had used (and eulogized) the
Mac for generations. The list is endless. Ever try keeping notes in real time
with a stylus and a handheld device? I did, which is why I switched to paper.

Examining the multitude of devices that fill my life (but do not fulfill my
needs) I see a mess of wires and connectability nightmares that leave me wandering
what happened to the third revolution –ubiquitous computing which promised
us that “computing devices connected in a wireless web will permeate our
entire physical environment, toiling behind the scenes to monitor and manage
our houses, factories, roads, vehicles - even our bodies” (see http://ubicomp.editthispage.com/).

As usual, the toiling is all the user’s. I see people with laptops, cellular
phones and PDAs lumbering about like beasts of burden, talking aloud in public
like village idots. Is this what we are promised more of in the future? I am
all for staying connected (within reason) but could some design team put all
this on my wrist please? And as long as we need to carry 15 inch screens around
with us in order to view information does it really matter how much speed or
memory you can stick on the head of a pin to dance with the angels?

21st century computing leaves a lot to be desired and when I think of the promise
of information architecture it lies mostly in the vision of merged physical
and informational environments where I need carry little with me other than
the means of identifying myself. This is not immersion or Virtual Reality but
true ubiquity, where, as the advocates say, the computers ‘get out of
the way’.

Such thoughts are a long way from website metadata concerns or search engine
design but if we are concerned with creating experiences then information architects
need to stop being so tool-centric and start examining how we can enable users
to move through space. Now that would be a global information infrastructure
that took proper account of physicality. Anyone want a used PDA?